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Friday, December 22, 2017

It Is What It Is

My choice of handstitching to create my pieces means that I am living with them in an unfinished state for a long time. And more often than not, there comes a time when I find I dislike or cease to believe in a piece. This could be an accurate evaluation of the work, but it happens so regularly that I have come to expect it and can usually find a way to work through it.

In early 2017 I launched into a new heavily textured piece that would use browns of varying hues-- a color that can easily become drab but I took that as a challenge. About a quarter of the way into the piece I decided it wasn't working. I shifted the colors a bit and it got interesting again. At half way through I was on the point of moving on to something else, moving it to some horizontal surface where it would quickly become covered with fabrics pulled out for a new project--when I changed the orientation to vertical and thought that worked. By the time I finished the top I hated it--until I realized that its orientation really was better the way I had originally envisioned it. But something was still wrong.

It sat on the design wall for a couple of weeks until I came up with the idea of beads. Ultimately, buttons were the perfect solution as well as some adjustments on the black outlines.

It Is What It Is 24" x 20"

It was no longer the piece I had originally envisioned but something new--and I liked it again. But I had moved between being pleased and hating it so many times that I was not sure whether anyone else would find it interesting. I christened it "It Is What It Is" because it is a piece I had come to accept not for my vision of it but for what it is, and, with some trepidation hung it in the Abstract Artists Group of New England show. It was noticed. It was liked!

This piece, which kept moving from the dark to the light in my evaluation, seems appropriate for the solstice.